What is a Flex PCB?
Flex PCB boards or flexible printed circuit boards, as the name suggests, carry out the function of regular PCB boards while being physically flexible. As you must know, PCBs or printed circuit boards carry out the function of establishing connections among various components inside an electrical or electronic device. While rigid PCB boards have ruled the market for so many years now, flex PCB boards emerged and opened the door to new possibilities due to their dynamic nature.

Bare boards of flexible printed circuit boards are made of flexible materials allowing them to bend and be manipulated as per the designer’s requirements. This feature of bendability and flexibility comes in handy while crafting various new-age gadgets such as wearables. To know more about these circuit boards also known as flexible circuit boards, continue reading below.

Classifications of Flexible Printed Circuit Boards
Flex PCB manufacturers can now design, fabricate, and customize PCBs with a wide variety of specifications. While the variations are enormous, flexible circuit boards can broadly be classified into a few types based on their layers and configurations.

By Layers: Single-sided, Double-sided, and Multi-layer flex PCBs
Based on the number of layers present in a flexible printed circuit board, they can be classified into single-sided, double-sided, and multi-layered PCBs. Each type has its advantages and features. While a higher number of layers allows a connection of more components, the complications, and overall costs also increase along with. Therefore, engineers at Hitechpcba study the project requirements carefully to find the best-suited type of flexible printed circuit board for an application.

Single-sided flex PCBs: Single only only have one conductive layer. These are the most commonly used flexible printed circuit boards, with excellent electronic and mechanical properties of flexible material, and also low cost. So they are widely used in consumer electronics.
Double-sided flex PCBs: There are two copper layers which are connected by plated through holes in double-layer flexible circuit boards. It combines high electronic performance and cost-effectiveness and is usually used in high-tech electronic devices with high volumes, such as laptops, cameras, and earphones., etc.
Multilayer flex PCBs: For such very advanced devices, very limited spacing or continuous moving is needed, so we need to use multilayer flexible PCB boards, such as robotics, industrial equipment, and medical applications. Such kind of flex PCB have three or more copper layers. But generally speaking, we do advice using more than four layers in flex PCB which will affect the flexibility.
By Characteristics: Standard flex PCB, Rigid-flex and HDI flexible PCBs
Similarly, based on configuration, flexible circuit boards can be divided into standard flex PCBs, rigid-flex PCBs and HDI flexible PCBs.

Standard flex PCBs: Standard flex PCBs are the most commonly used flexible circuit boards. They are usually produced by polyimide, with one or two conductive layers and stiffeners.
Rigid-flex PCBs: As the name suggests, rigid-flex PCBs are a combination of the features of both rigid and flexible PCBs. In this type of flex PCB board, only the required areas of the PCB are made with flexible materials that help connect the rigid parts of the circuit. This reduces the cost while allowing the PCB to bend as per the requirement.
HDI flexible PCBs: HDI flexible PCBs or high-density interconnect circuit boards can be considered as the advanced version of flexible PCBs. They offer better features and improved performance than regular flexible printed circuit boards.

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